It's anguishing to view the daily apocalyptic scenes of the Dixie Fire in California and the massive fires near Athens, Greece, that are destroying their last remaining forests. According to a July 15, 2021 CNN news report, close to a million acres in 12 states from 107 fires have scorched the Earth!
We are in a definite global crisis with our planet rapidly over-heating. I appreciate how Umair Haque captures the big picture in just a few words. Note: In another piece, Umair notes our country's disproportionate role in CO2 emissions.
To go deeper, consider reading David Wallace-Wells titled, "The Uninhabitable Earth"—also available on Audible.com. Jess Goodell's piece titled, "Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End," featured in the Rolling Stone, is also informative. Taken together, we in the U.S. have a special responsibility to address climate change due to our excessive carbon footprint that's killing the planet.
To Umair's point, we absolutely are not meant to survive the planet we are creating.
To that end, we must educate ourselves on such matters. What are out schools doing to promote environmental awareness? We should all take a close look at President Biden's campaign promises on climate change and whether they go far enough. Exploring and getting involved in local efforts should be an ongoing task for us all.
Here in Austin's hill country, experts say that it's not whether raging fires will at some point visit us, but rather when this will happen. In fact, they already have, costing lives.
I see all of this as profoundly spiritual. Rather than hand-wringing and attempting to distance ourselves from these calamities, we should engage in ceremony, mourning the loss of animal life, vegetation, and human lives while humbling ourselves as a species to the consequences of humanity's bottomless delusional conceit about our harmful impact on the only planet we call home.
This hubris is born out of our extractive relationship to nature to the point of being closed to the idea of our interconnectedness to it as our Indigenous elders and ancestors have always known.
This should concern us all. Not only are future generations at risk, but the present one, too. At the rate that the Earth is heating, could it already be too late to transition away from a carbon-based economy? That's the question at hand.
For those losing their homes, businesses, towns, and livelihoods, it already is too late for them, unfortunately. When will we learn?
-Angela Valenzuela
It Feels a Lot Like We’re Taking the Planet Past the Point of No Return
The question that needs to be asked is a grim and difficult one. It goes like this.
Are we pushing the planet past its tipping points?
Let me explain. If you’re not versed in these basics of climate science, you should be. It’s not just warming alone that’s bad. It’s that warming triggers “feedbacks” — changes in the planet’s great systems that then accelerate warming. How much? From anywhere from apocalyptic to cataclysmic. Feedbacks can turn a slow, centuries long trend of warming into a quick few decades of sudden, incredibly fast, cataclysmic overheating.
“Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts.”
How fast are we talking? We’re talking about abrupt warming that happens within one human lifetime. Unfortunately, one that happens to be ours.
What kinds of feedbacks could produce the rapid warming we’re beginning to see — the sudden, abrupt overheating that’s leaving even climate scientists shocked?
To understand that, you need to know about the planet’s great ecologies. The ocean currents recirculate warm water and cool it, keeping the temperature of the ocean relatively low. There are the polar ice caps, which reflect sunlight, and cool the planet. The great rainforests, like the Amazon, absorb carbon from the skies, and breathe out fresh air.
Those you probably have some awareness of — here are a few you might not know about.
The boreal forests — the northern ones — are the largest ecosystem on the planet. They absorb vast amounts of carbon, too. Then there’s the northern permafrost, which keeps massive deposits of methane trapped — and the rocks in those areas do, too. The monsoons keep Africa and Asia cool, and their soils fertile. The coral reefs keep coastal areas of oceans healthy and vibrant with life.
These great ecologies are are also the planet’s great tipping points. There are, depending on how you count, and who you ask, from between eight to ten of them — I’ve barely touched on them, but this isn’t a book. The point is: these are systems we really don’t want to mess with.
Why not? Because collapsing these ecosystems will almost certainly lead to runaway global warming. Each one of these great ecologies plays an equilibrating or balancing role. Push them too far, and they break apart — but breaking them leads to feedbacks. For example, if the ocean currents slow down, and no longer circulate warm water, because the planet’s gotten too hot, then it heats even faster. If the poles don’t reflect light, because there’s little ice left, then the planet heats that much faster.
See what climate scientists mean by “feedbacks” now? You can think of them as simply a vicious circle. The point is to understand that global warming isn’t just a matter of first-order effects — but second and third order ones, too. Heating the planet so much breaks ecosystems, which protected the planet from heating up, and without them, a kind of chain reaction begins.
Now that you’re acquainted with the basics of climate science — and my apologies if I’ve explained it clumsily — let’s go through how many of tipping points we actually appear to be reaching. This is where things start to get pretty frightening, by the way.
Ocean currents? The most important one is the Gulf Stream. But in the last few months, “climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found ‘an almost complete loss of stability over the last century’ of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).”
Did you get that?
“The signs of destabilisation being visible already is something that I wouldn’t have expected and that I find scary,” said Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who did the research. “It’s something you just can’t [allow to] happen.”
Ocean currents slowing and stopping are probably the biggest, most dangerous tipping point of all. Hit that point, and you get into the stuff of sci-fi movies. Just imagine what happens if oceans can’t cool the planet’s waters anymore. Bang. We all cook.
But we’re only just beginning.
What about the ice sheets? “A significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, after which accelerated melting would become inevitable even if global heating was halted, according to new research.”
The same is more or less true at the Antarctic, too, where vast portions of the great polar ice now break off regularly.
What happens as this ecosystem is broken? “Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet would have long-term global consequences, beyond rising sea levels. It could halt the Gulf Stream ocean current, with potential knock-on effects on the Amazon rainforest and tropical monsoons.” See how all these great ecologies are connected?
That’s two so far: ocean currents and ice sheets. Both appear to be hitting tipping points.
Let’s do a third one now. What about the methane deposits trapped by the permafrost? “Scientists have been shocked that the warm weather conducive to permafrost thawing is occurring roughly 70 years ahead of model projections.”
The permafrost-methane situation is so bad you can literally see the methane bubbling away in YouTube videos. You can literally see the permafrost melting and the land buckling in satellite imagery. Hence, plenty of scientists describe all this as a “ticking methane bomb.” The clock, though, seems to be running down much, much faster than anyone much expected.
Nobody knows when the clock runs out. What we do know is what happens when it does. Methane is released in massive quantities. Bang. So fast and so hard it’s game over for us and civilization, basically. No, we’re not at that point yet. But we’re getting closer every day — way, way faster than we ever thought we were, so fast that you can literally see it happening.
That’s just three tipping points. The evidence appears to suggest we’re hitting all of them.
Let’s do one more, just for good measure.
The Amazon used to be one of the planet’s great carbon sinks — absorbing more carbon than it emitted. Recently, though — just this summer — that finally went into reverse. The Amazon is now a net carbon emitter — thanks to dieback and loss and deforestation.
That’s a classic, undeniable tipping point being hit. As the Amazon becomes a net carbon emitter, what limiting effect it had on cooling the planet vanishes, and the planet warms that much faster, in a chain reaction of overheating.
We’ve covered about half the planet’s great ecologies — and the evidence, sadly, appears to be that we’re hitting tipping points in each of them. I could go on with the other half — and more or less the same thing would be true.
This isn’t a scientific paper. I raise the issue to begin to try to make a certain link, to try to connect a series of dots.
What is it that explains the incredibly severe intensity with which the planet’s now warming? Why is it that the planet’s overheating so incredibly fast that you and I can literally feel it year by year? Why is it that incredibly extreme events are now suddenly commonplace — California on fire, Siberia melting, Canadian towns the hottest places on earth, Germany flooded?
What’s behind all this?
Well, what would explain all of it is if we’ve indeed pushed the planet past its tipping points. If we’ve set off the chain reaction of runaway global warming. That’s more or less the only thing that would explain the freakish, frightening extreme events we’ve all been seeing — and many of us have been living through — recently.
Doesn’t it feel like that? Like something’s changed? Like we’ve pushed things too far? It does to me. I recently came back to the East Coast of the States. It’s now as hot — trapped under a heat dome — as the Indian subcontinent used to be when I was a kid. Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent looks like it might not even be habitable in a decade or two. What’s going to happen when “wet bulb” temperatures are reached there — the point at which you can’t survive, period? Nobody knows, except I guess a lot of people die.
It feels to me like something has changed. Like suddenly, we are crossing the planet’s great tipping points. Hence, the way that extreme events are becoming commonplace, and the summers are heating so fast that each one is now noticeably hotter than the last. Hence, the way that mega flood and mega fire — of the kind which can incinerate and wreck whole towns and cities in moments — have become just new normal parts of our lives and vocabularies.
Something is going very wrong. That’s what it feels like to me.
This isn’t science — sorry. But science? That takes time. Decades. Decades we don’t have. That’s not to devalue science — it’s only to offer a bit of perspective. Yes, science can “confirm” that we’ve crossed the threshold of runaway warming — a decade or so after we have. By then? The planet will look vastly different. What will it look like?
The scenario we appear to be heading towards is what climate scientists often call “hothouse earth.” Think about it this way. The last time the earth was this hot was between three and five million years ago. But we’re heating it up so fast that every that by 2050, it’ll be as hot as it was about seven to ten million years or more ago. In other words, we’re heating up the planet so fast that each of our years is becoming millions of years in geological time now.
Hothouse earth means that the climate ends up about 4 to 5 degrees Celsius warmer than its pre-industrial average. That might not sound like a lot, so consider that right about now, we’re only at about one degree or so. And that one degree or so is enough to incinerate California and Australia, flood Europe, and drown Asia.
Two degrees? That’s when places like California become unlivable, when Europe floods massively every year, when “wet bulb temperatures” begin to be reached and human habitability is called into question. Three degrees? That’s when the planet is ringed with Fire and Flood Belts, in which nobody much can live — and vast portions of it are simply flatly uninhabitable. Four degrees? Sea levels rise by meters, coasts recede, the world’s great cities flood, and the basics of our civilisation snap apart like twigs.
Our civilisation is barely, just barely, surviving one degree. It might, just might survive two — though millions will perish. It won’t survive three. And four? Four is the stuff of cataclysm — the planet’s as hot then as it was during the last great extinction of life on earth. At those temperatures, life as we know it becomes an impossibility. Good luck getting timber for furniture, clean water, fresh food, breathable air. Bang. Game over.
And yet it seems to me that only one thing can explain the extreme freakish weirdness we’re beginning to see. Washington DC now as hot as Delhi was just a few decades ago. German towns washed away. Californian towns incinerated. Megafire and megaflood. Heat domes parked over the Northern Hemisphere. Each summer noticeably, dramatically hotter than the last.
It feels to me like we’re crossing the planet’s great tipping points. We are pushing too far, past points of no return, which feel like they’re setting off the chain reaction of overheating that is going to lead to a hothouse planet which resembles an earth from a distant past of millions of years ago.
We human beings? We’ve only been around for 300,000 years. We’re heating the planet to resemble the one of ten million years ago. Maybe you see the problem. We weren’t made to survive on a planet like the one we’re creating. And that, my friend, seems to me spell very bad news indeed.
Umair
August 2021
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